Digital Milestone: 52 Percent of U.S. Publishers Have More Mobile Users Than PC Users

Digital Milestone: 52 Percent of U.S. Publishers Have More Mobile Users Than PC Users2015-08-062016-06-28https://www.vertoanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/verto_logo_rgb.pngVerto Analyticshttps://www.vertoanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/verto-analytics-digital-milestone-mobile-users.jpg200px200px

According to Verto Content Watch data from June 2015, the U.S. digital content market has taken a significant step ahead; more than half of the Top 100 digital publishers in the U.S. now have more mobile users accessing their services on a monthly basis than PC users.

Understanding the Data

Verto’s Top 100 Digital Publishers chart (seen below) reports the top 100 US publishers in terms of the number of monthly unduplicated mobile users and monthly unduplicated PC users. In the chart, mobile includes both smartphones and tablets. The diagonal line divides publishers into either PC-centric or mobile-centric publishers, depending on the number of their mobile vs. PC users. Plotting the Top 100 publishers in the chart shows that 52 percent of the digital publishers are mobile-centric today. Moreover, the number of mobile-centric publishers is increasing monthly.

Today, 52% of the Top 100 Digital Publishers Have More Mobile Users Than PC Users

The Mobile Shift

“This is the first time mobile has overtaken PC as the primary means to access major digital services online. This tells us that the industry needs to focus on mobile-first strategies to keep consumers happy,” comments Hannu Verkasalo, CEO of Verto Analytics.

Based on Verto’s new chart, publishers can be generally divided into three groups. First, there are the big, market-leading publishers such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google that capture nearly the entire digital market monthly both on PC and mobile. They all lie very close to the diagonal line drawn in the chart. Second, we see many traditionally major PC-centric publishers such as Microsoft and Adobe that are beneath the line. These companies, however, are moving up towards the diagonal line. Microsoft is currently one of the top companies growing in terms of mobile users in fact. This is due mainly because of their change in strategy to push their apps to Android and iOS devices, as well as to their own. Third, there are new, emerging publishers (e.g. King in mobile gaming), which are all primary born in the mobile-centric world. They build their services and tailor content for mobile – and have almost always more mobile users right from very beginning. They understand that in order to win over today’s consumer, that it is imperative to focus on building loyalty and engagement on mobile devices.

Stay tuned as we keep tabs on the Top Publishers and more!

*Note: The data used in this analysis is from the Verto Content Watch service, which includes all of the digital properties and assets of the Top U.S. publishers. For big publishers such as Google, Facebook and Apple, this includes all apps, web properties, streaming media services, messaging platforms, or social media services they own or operate. A Twitter feed, for example, shown on any site or app, is counted as Twitter’s exposure with consumers.